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Helping kids’ develop self-regulation

Even with our fully developed brains, we adults still struggle with managing our moods, energy and attention. You only have to take a drive to see impatience, irritability and rage playing out on our roads — and it’s not so different on the information superhighway.

Yet, as parents, we often find ourselves wondering what went wrong and getting frustrated with our children when they fail to control themselves.

Whether it’s a tantrum or a full-blown meltdown, anxiety, distraction or failure to listen, what lies at the heart of this behaviour is self-regulation.

Essentially, self-regulation means regulation of the self by the self.

Dr Stuart Shanker, a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at York University, is an expert in self-regulation who has visited Australia a number of times.

His research has shown that it’s self-regulation, rather than just self-control, which influences not just how children learn, but how they behave and how they see themselves.

What is self-regulation?

“Self-regulation is the ability to manage your own energy states, emotions, behaviours and attention, in ways that are socially acceptable and help achieve positive goals, such as maintaining good relationships, learning and maintaining wellbeing,” according to Dr Shanker.

Dr Shanker’s key message is that children’s capacity to self-regulate largely determines how well they will perform at school, much more than whether they can count, or be good at picture recognition or colouring-in within the lines.

The theory is that kids vary how much ‘gas’ or energy they have and can use in coping with life. Dr Shanker believes kids who burn less energy, have more energy to manage delayed gratification and to cope.

Essentially, there are five domains that contribute to a child’s ability to self-regulate. There can be overlaps and interactions that happen spontaneously, in different ways throughout the day. They are:

Biological

Emotional

Cognitive

Social

Pro Social.

There are six stages of energy that lie between inhibition and activation, and kids need to be at level four — relaxed alertness — to be able to do well in school as well as in the playground.

Inhibition

Asleep

Drowsy

Hypoalert

Calm, focused and alert

Hyperalert

Flooded

Activation

Why do some kids burn more energy?

Some children’s temperaments can contribute to whether they use too much energy — like using petrol in a car — and so can their environments.

Stress: the modern childhood epidemic

Our modern, often chaotic world is drowning our families in stress and tension that impacts on how our precious babies meet the world in the first years of life.

For those who have older children or even adolescents who have poor self-regulation, it can be built by teaching them calming strategies and other physical ways of discharging excess energy from the body.

According to Dr Shanker, there are three main ways to help children improve self-regulation:

Commonly known as Australia’s ‘queen of common sense’, Maggie is an author, educator, & parenting & resilience specialist. She is a dedicated advocate to quietly changing lives in our families and communities.